Long recently, and long within the full span of my lifetime.
Recently, it's been part of my Kanopy queue, probably for something like three or four years now.
Within the full span of my lifetime, it was one of the movies my mother recorded off The Movie Channel (and may never have watched). Seeing it in the plastic bins with all the other VHS tapes of movies she'd recorded and never watched led to speculation on my part about what it was about.
Actually I did know something of what it was about, because there was an image of it I'd caught somewhere -- probably in an ad on The Movie Channel -- that haunted me. For those of you who've seen that movie, you'd know the image was David Bowie buried in sand, so only his head poked above the surface.
I probably would have gotten to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence before now except that I am such a slave to thematically appropriate viewings that I think I thought I had to watch it at Christmastime. Even knowing it was set a prison camp run by the Japanese in World War II, I thought with that title, I had to save it for December.
But see the thing is, in December, I've got no time for random 41-year-old movies starring David Bowie. I need to watch movies from the current release year in order to prepare my year-end list, I need to watch genuine Christmas movies, and usually I need to watch old favorites that taste just a little bit better during the holiday season. Old movies that are new to me get the short shrift pretty much from after Halloween until late January.
So a Tuesday night in May ended up being the right time to watch Nagisa Oshima's film.
I liked it about as well as I like any movie set in a camp holding prisoners of war, which is to say, just fine. Actually, that's a bit of short shrift for these movies themselves. As soon as I started to test the validity of my middling response to POW movies, I started to think of exceptions, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17 and a movie I only just watched for the first time about a month ago, The Human Condition: No Greater Love. Which, incidentally, is also made by a Japanese director.
What I can say for sure, though, is that I am not inclined to go on at length about the details of the movie. It was good, it had good performances, enough said.
Of course, if that were all I had to say about it, I'd only be addressing half of my chosen title for this post.
Nary a few moments into Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I noticed there were Japanese characters, not to mention one English character, who were speaking in Japanese, without the Japanese being translated.
And I immediately felt I could not be certain what were the true intentions of the filmmaker.
In most English language movies, we are accustomed to expecting dialogue spoken in foreign languages to be subtitled. This happens without us having to do anything as viewers. For a very small percentage of English language movies, the film will choose not to provide a translation -- often for the purpose of disorienting their English-speaking audiences, just as the English-speaking characters are disoriented.
If you see a movie in the theater, and you are in a country where English is the official language, you know exactly what the filmmaker's intentions are. Since there is no ability for any individual audience member to customize their viewing experience, we are handed the subtitling option appropriate for the largest number of viewers. And if we get no subtitles, it means the director sure as heck intended it to be that way.
At home, though, we are in a thoroughly customizable environment. We can have subtitles on. We can have descriptive text for the hearing impaired. Sometimes we might even be able to dub it into another language.
But what should we do? What did the director want us to do?
I did turn on the subtitles in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, not only because I suspected they were supposed to be on, but because even some of the words spoken in English, with their heavy British or Japanese accents, benefitted from having on-screen text as a reference point.
But when the subtitles don't exist as the default option -- like, embedded into the print rather than layered on top -- you don't really know what you're supposed to do. Maybe you're not supposed to understand what the Japanese characters are saying, or what the one Brit who can speak Japanese is saying when he's speaking to them. Maybe this is all meant to approximate the experience of being a prison of war in a foreign land. (The film is actually set in Java, Indonesia, but there are no Indonesian characters.)
Because these subtitles were offset from the screen by big black rectangular boxes behind them, it gave me even more of a sense that what I was seeing was alien to the original print. Maybe whoever distributed this version of the print translated because they could, not because they should.
Often I am allergic to googling the answer to one of the rhetorical questions I ask here, but in this case I did look it up. Apparently, there are two versions of the film, one with subtitles and one without. You are "supposed" to watch the one without. (So, we got the version without, but the subtitles existed as an a la carte option.)
The guy on Reddit who posted about it made what I thought was a good point about what we were "supposed" to do in this case, saying "While it sounds intriguing, I wouldn't want to miss out on half the movie if it isn't true."
I agree with this. We are only going to see most movies once in this life -- actually, most movies we are going to zero times, but you know what I'm saying. If you are only going to watch something once, you better watch the version that gives you the best chance of comprehending it.
I'd say you could then go back and watch the version without subtitles if you really love it, but you can't un-learn the dialogue that was being said.
Maybe I'll rewatch Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence again 20 years from now, having forgotten what was being said from scene to scene -- maybe even the entire gist of the plot -- and see what I think of it.
And maybe I can schedule that particular viewing for Christmastime.
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